Author Archives: Stephen Collins

Of wagons, and staying on them

A few weeks back, I got a minor tear in my left calf. Of all causes, it was from trip­ping down a gut­ter to avoid a skater! You’d think I had bet­ter bal­ance.
When these things come early in a process of re-​​​​whatever (I’m re-​​​​ing a lot of things), it’s easy to fall back into bad […]

Week 1 — Mindsets and making it happen

One of the biggest fac­tors I have found in being moti­vated to lose fat and get fit is to have great men­tors. The other is to, obvi­ously, keep doing the right thing in terms of exer­cise and diet and the periph­eral tasks around them. It helps to main­tain the right mindset.

So, this week, I did […]

Day 3 and the munchies hit

It’s always the way.
When I’ve tried diet­ing in the past and not been suc­cess­ful (which is most of the time), it’s about now that I fall flat. I imag­ine it’s pretty much the same story for many peo­ple who strug­gle with their weight. We have great inten­tions but we aren’t often moti­vated enough to stick at […]

Numb3rs

The July issue of Wired (one of my favorite mag­a­zines) bears the tag line Liv­ing by Num­bers. A sig­nif­i­cant pro­por­tion of the mag­a­zine is devoted to men­tal and phys­i­cal hacks you can use to track your well­be­ing bases on quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis.
There are a bunch of great arti­cles in there on the mea­sur­able ben­e­fits, espe­cially for […]

Day 1 — Training

I promised Derek on the week­end when we embarked on talk­ing about this that I would run 3km today. So I did. Almost.
I took it easy and shuf­fled, know­ing that this would mean I got through. I had to walk about half of the last kilo­me­ter after my calves com­plained loudly (that’s what car­ry­ing a […]

Day 1 — Starts and first goals

This used to be me.

But not any more. I’m barely able to run 3km, let alone a 1.5−40−10 triathlon.
That’s all about to change, for all the rea­sons in the first post here and more.
So let’s look at my start­ing point:
Weight  —  94.0kg (207lb)
Height  —  170cm (5’7″)
BF%  —  30% (esti­mated)
Rest­ing heart rate  —  72bpm
Waist  —  92cm (36″)
Those are a long way from my best ever con­di­tion in the first […]

The change

A cou­ple of weeks ago, my friend, Gavin Heaton, tagged me to write a Man­Week post. He wanted me, and the oth­ers tagged, to dis­cuss what we thought it meant to be a man, and why. I didn’t respond then, because I had too many things bounc­ing around in my head to say any­thing coherent. […]